The present disclosure relates to technology for non-volatile storage.
Semiconductor memory is used in various electronic devices. For example, non-volatile semiconductor memory is used in cellular telephones, digital cameras, personal digital assistants, mobile computing devices, non-mobile computing devices and other devices. Electrical Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory (EEPROM) and flash memory are among the most popular non-volatile semiconductor memories.
Typically, the memory device has a memory controller and one or more memory packages. The memory package has one or more logical units. As one example, each logical unit can be a separate memory die. Each memory die contains non-volatile storage elements (e.g., memory cells), as well as read and write circuitry. The memory package also contains addressing circuitry in order to properly address the memory cells. As one example, the memory package includes NAND flash memory. However, memory packages other than NAND flash are known.
To achieve better parallelism, each logical unit in the memory package can be divided into multiple planes. A plane may be defined as a unit that is able to report its own operating status and can perform command execution independent of other planes in the logical unit. For example, each plane may have its own data registers, data buffers, etc., to enable independent command operation. As one example, a memory controller can send a multi-plane read command to the logical unit, which executes read commands in two (or more) planes in parallel. Other example multi-plane commands include, but are not limited to, multi-plane program and multi-plane erase.